A group of eager learners in the Sign Bilingual program at NextSense School discovered just how much fun science can be recently when they took on a rewarding engineering challenge to save the bees.

As part of their science syllabus the students, who are deaf or hard of hearing, learnt all about bees during a STEM challenge to create a bee pollinator hotel.

The pollinator hotels are designed for solitary bees that don’t belong to a hive and need to search for new homes and a safe place to lay their eggs.

Kate, a teacher in our Sign bilingual program, led the project and enjoyed watching her students use their creativity and problem solving skills.

‘First the children learnt about pollinators, then set about designing and building one,’ Kate says.

The students needed to problem solve how to create a pollinator with different sized nesting tubes that would stay dry and provide shelter for bee eggs.

‘And they relished the challenge.’

‘They were so engaged in learning –they went for it and were so creative. They demonstrated great teamwork and collaboration skills, and it was awesome to see them so engaged with the challenge.’

Over several weeks, the children worked in teams to design, build and test their pollinator plans – and the results made them very proud.

Now the pollinator hotels are up around the school playground attracting bees.

‘Children who are deaf and use Auslan to communicate are part of a real community – it’s like family, so they really loved coming together on this project,’ Kate says.

Kate is one of three NextSense School teachers who recently graduated from the Master of Disability Studies offered by NextSense Institute in affiliation with Macquarie University.

Now she puts all the knowledge she learned into practice every day in the classroom.

NextSense School offers a purpose-built learning environment for primary school students across three streams: Spoken Language, Sign Bilingual, and Blind/Low vision. With an adapted NSW curriculum, low teacher-student ratios and an approach that embeds research evidence into day-to-day teaching techniques, we give children the foundations to realise their potential.